Thursday Night

[billboyd]

The evening of the Open Call, the Bill/Johnny Convo, and the Bill/Orlando Convo.

Bill pulls the Mini half onto Johnny's drive and half on the grass. There's plenty of room at the moment, but once he's ready to go, he's not interested in getting blocked in. In his experience, when he's ready to get away from the DBY crew, he's ready now.

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[_johnny]

Johnny nods back at Bill, squints a little. He's kinda high, actually, pretty sure he's sorta floating, like, but that's fine, that's cool, as long as he can keep his metaphorical feet on the fuckin' allegorical floor. He swings one foot down from the coffee table, and the bare sole makes a satisfying slap on the wood. Good.

"Floor's still there," he confides to Bill, who tilts his head curiously.

"Ah-"

Johnny shakes his head, stabs the air with his joint. "I am a very successful fuckup, Bill. My daddy always said I'd made a fine career of fuckin' up, and he was right, although it was fuckin' down that made me my money, you follow? Fucking... I don't know, you know, it's like-"

Johnny considers both his hands for a second, decides his mouth is dry and leans forward enough to scrub the joint out in the ashtray.

"-like, like Jack. I shoulda kept my mouth shut. You ever do something so bad that it ruins everything after? You ever fuck up that hard? You know what I'm talkin' about?"

[billboyd]

Bill has. Of course he has, who hasn't?

His mind inevitably ratchets backward, a casette tape reel doing a jerky, unpleasant rewind, and the room is bright and the upholstery is expensive and the carpet is deep pile and so soft that Bill's boots sink at least an inch into it, and it's the most unlikely place in the world for a gunfight, and the two stupid twats beside him are both still standing, staring, three shots in, and Bill shoves (Orlando) the bloke closest to him and shoots at the same time, steps to the side to shield him (Orlando) with his body and feels the (searingly bright pain and the spill of superheated blood down his thigh inside his trousers, and hours later, doped to the gills from surgery but coming down, he'll ponder how the feel of the blood trickling rivulets of body-temperature liquid death down his leg had bothered him more than the pain of being shot) bullet slam into this thigh, and one of the fuckers Bill'd shot is screaming, high and gurgling and ceaseless

[_johnny]

"Yeah, yeah, 'course you do. I can tell." Johnny shakes his head, pats his shirt pockets with a frown. He had ready-rolled, somewhere, before... A cigarette materalizes in his lap, and he looks up; Bill's nodding at him, and Johnny grins.

"Thanks, man." He lights up, leans his head back and blows a couple rings at the ceiling, watches them break up as they start to float away. Metafuckinphors, again, man, it's like... "Shit."

He shakes his head again. "I didn't talk to Orlando. I mean, I can't, like. I can't tell him he shouldn't be using, right, I can't, I ain't got a fuckin' leg to stand on, moral fuckin... high ground, fuck it, I'm in a hole m'self, you know, Bill, I-"

Johnny swings his other foot to the floor, leans up and forward to brace his elbows on his knees.

"I do love him," he says clearly, "but I can't help him. I can't even help myself, right now, and I'm more than a little fucked up right now, so, you know, if you ever mention this again, I will fuckin' kill you, okay? But the truth is I am goddamn tired of

[billboyd]

Bill says nothing, because really, what the hell do you say to something like that?

He stands, and Johnny's brows slide upward in question. "Hang on," Bill says, and Johnny nods, his brows returning to their normal resting place above his eyes, if a bit knotted together in puzzlement. Bill turns away, and manages to get to the kitchen before he runs a hand through his hair, ignoring the dampness of his palm.

He is deeply unnerved. He is deeply fucking unnerved, and he's not even sure what it is that's got his hackles up. It's just... Johnny, as ridiculously eccentric as he is, has always been so fucking stable. Fucking solid, in spite of his nebulous-ness, sharp and present in spite of his singular lack of lucidity, and Bill should have fucking seen this. He's never been so bloody blind and useless, and he's not sure if he's more angry or fucking ashamed.

He jerks his head to one side hard, and his neck gives a satisfyingly loud, pseudo-painful crack, followed by a few seconds of instense relief

[_johnny]

Johnny opens the other eye, and waves a hand. "Nah, drink up. Mi casa es blah blah. Something. Don't know

[billboyd]

Fuck, Bill thinks. He downs his second healthy slug of liquid fire (albeit exceedingly smooth, sleek fire), and pours himself another.

Then he downs that, too.

Fuck, fuck, fucking fuck!He spends several seconds roundly cursing his psychology degree -- clearly useless -- and then several more watching Johnny jam his eyes into the back of his head with the heels of his hands

[_johnny]

Johnny lets go of Bill's wrist, flops back into the couch cushions. It's funny, it's fuckin' hilarious, as a matter of fact, it's like fuckin' compulsive or something, he can't keep himself together, but he's gonna take care of everybody else if it kills him. He's like-

"Florence fuckin' Nightingale or something," he mutters, "Man, I need some coffee. People gonna be here in an hour or something, I gotta-"

Johnny wipes his eyes on the back of his hand, just watering, man, that's it, lotta smoke in here. He pulls himself to his feet, pinching the bridge of his nose, and one foot in front of the other goes over to the sliding glass doors at the back of the room, opens them for a rush of warm evening air. He looks out across the backyard, braces his forearm on the doorframe above his head. Orlando's cottage is still dark

[billboyd]

Bill follows Johnny into the kitchen (leaving his empty glass next to The Mcallan with a twinge of regret); he stands in the doorway for a few seconds, just watching Johnny jitter around the room, collecting filter and coffee and spoon and container of what is probably sugar.

He pulls the coffee maker out from the wall (Capresso, reads the elegant lettering near the top of the machine, and Bill smiles slightly) and plugs it in. The entire back detaches, and Johnny holds it under the tap until it's full and then slides it back onto the machine. He tugs the carafe out of the space between hotplate and basket, and Bill listens to the glass chatter against the surface of the countertop for an instant before Johnny lets go

[billboyd]

"So, then," he says, letting a tiny trickle of contempt color his voice. Johnny stops pacing and turns to look at Bill. Bill crosses his arms over his chest and widens his stance, cocking one knee, deliberately aggressive. Johnny's body reacts, turning slightly to one side, as though to present a smaller target, while Johnny's face merely frowns at him, puzzled. It's all so very fucking familiar, and Bill isn't sure how to decipher his own response to Johnny's response

[_johnny]

The sound of a fist connecting with a face doesn't sound the way it does in the movies, there's no *pow*, there's no *bam*. No ADR, man. It's a softer sound than you'd think, sometimes accompanied by the muted crack of bone, or a cry of pain.

When Johnny punches Bill in the face reflexes he'd forgotten he had, muscle memory, the swing, the strike the only sound is that of the air leaving Bill's lungs in a grunt of surprise, overlaying the faint smack of Johnny's knuckles colliding with Bill's jaw.

His head snaps to one side with a sickening crack, and Bill teeters and flails for a moment before catching himself on the counter, blood welling from his lip, trickling from his nose, and Johnny flashes for a moment on the colour, bright and shocking against Bill's pale skin.

"You don't know what the fuck you're talkin' about, man-"

"Oh, please," Bill spits, hauls himself up and he gets a half step toward Johnny before Johnny swings again. Bill's neck snaps again, his cheek already purpling

[billboyd]

"I know what that is, John," Bill says solemnly, and doesn't look away from Johnny's glittery eyes, all the hurt and confusion and jagged edges visible in them for anyone to see for a moment.

But it's draining out of Johnny's face, that jittering tension, coiled and self-destructive, and that's good enough for Bill.

He turns and spits into this sink, then runs the tap for a second to wash it down the drain. His left cheek is throbbing dully, echoing his heartbeat. He thinks he'll have a beautiful fucking shiner by morning. "You've got a hell of a right hook, J.D. I had you pegged as a brawler."

[_johnny]

In the living room, the stereo clicks and stops.

It takes second, between THC and alcohol and adrenaline and endorphins, all at war, all flying through his blood at the speed of sound or something insane, fucking angry still which is at the very least better than fucked up and defeated and and-

"Fuck you," Johnny snaps, and he flexes his fists again. "You little motherfucker. Fuck. You."

There's something like smile threatening to spread across Johnny's face, and he twitches his jaw, trying to stomp it down. He fails utterly.

[billboyd]

Bill tears a paper towel off the roll and blots at his lip, wincing slightly

[_johnny]

"No," Johnny answers honestly; shakes his head at Bill's narrowed eyes. "No, but close enough to pass, man... thanks."

Thanks for getting me riled enough to stop being pitiful, thanks for helping me fight this thing, thanks for taking it, thanks for being there. Johnny lowers his face over the coffee cup, inhaling the steam. His shoulders shake a little, the tattered remains of both his high and his depression still trying to fight it out, and he might cry, if he had the energy for anything other than resignation

[billboyd]

Bill sips at his own coffee and coniders

[_johnny]

Johnny understands, through the drug haze and the nearly equal pains in his head and his hand, and the sickening urge to just fucking drown in self-pity, man, he really gets it. He himself, he can sleep, but it's been all but meaningless for years. He hasn't had rest, for real, for years. Since.

Yeah.

Yeah, they both have a since, don't they? Bill's got something weighing just as heavily, stabbing at his guts just as sharply. It would explain the sparking bare wires of Bill's nerves, visible only to somebody like Johnny, only to somebody who fucking gets it, exhaustion, man. When he said he thought Bill knew what he meant by 'tired', he meant soul deep, and that's what he can see in the eyes of the man across from him.

"Since?" Johnny asks, takes a scalding sip of coffee, never looking away. "C'mon, man, showed you mine."